New Age Business: How to Help Your Company Adapt to Technological Advancements

Hannah Whittenly

May 02, 2017

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Competing in the modern business world often comes down to keeping up with the latest of technology inventions and advancements. The goal should always be to get the most value out of any tech that you have, but the occasional upgrade or innovative new product is essential to help you keep up with business rivals. This can often be a major project, but there are ways to help your company adapt to technical advances more easily—here are just a few of those:

Align the Technology to Your Goals

You can determine the type of technology that you need from what your short-term and long-term business objectives are. This could be something such as integrating a business intelligence system or expanding customer service. Identify your goal and outline precisely what you need from a new technical solution. Be sure that you can see a clear path to improvement that justifies the expense.

An example of a goal that you have that might require a change in the technology that you use is marketing. Does your company have a goal of how many people that you’d like to reach by a certain date? Out of the number of those that you reach, how many do you estimate will convert into sales and affect your Return On Investment (ROI)? Once you have those questions answered, you can then think about what technology will result into the outcome that you desire. Perhaps you will decide to incorporate more social media advertising—such as Facebook or Instagram. Maybe you will create an app for potential customers to engage with that will lead them to the product that you are trying to get them to be interested in.

Evaluate Your Resources

If you have limited IT and HR staff, then you will want to find a software or computer system that's very user-friendly, requires minimal training, and is easy to integrate with existing systems. Simple deployment and compatibility is essential to minimize any downtime or any need for upgrading other systems that might be affected. Both of these issues will only increase your cost and reduce your ROI.

For example, you don’t want to get a new software that none of your employees have ever used before as that will take a ton of confusion and cause a lot of down time—or just time that isn’t terribly productive—as there will need to be a lot of time being put in for everyone to learn the new software. If a new software is absolutely necessary and will benefit your business more in the long run, then you should ease into it. Select a small portion of your business employees—such as company execs and managers—and have them receive intense training in that software. Then, have them pass on the information little by little to their teams. You could even have one team start with the software first before it gets passed onto other teams so that your company’s overall productivity doesn’t drop all of the sudden so that everyone can get used to the new software.

Research and Prioritize

With the above steps, you have pretty much already defined a list of criteria that defines what you need, what you can afford, and what priorities must be met. Put together a forward-thinking team of key leaders within your company to promote and research technical change. Look to hire those who are educated in the newest technologies (as well as a variety of the oldest and still prevalent technologies) and perhaps even earned a technology MBA. The future of business follows technical advances as they make it easier for businesses to reach people.

If you’re looking for someone who has their MBA and don’t think that you can afford to do that, try recruiting people right as they are graduating from their program. Within the first few years after graduating, people are more likely to go more for experience and the opportunity to build their resume than the highest of pay. Another thing that you should look for in people who have their MBA’s is to see what each person may specialize in and going with the person whose specialty will most likely benefit your company. For example, one person may be a genius at JavaScript while the other person is pretty confident in HTML and CSS. Which one does your business use the most? Whichever one that is, you would then go with that.

Integrate

Many people accustomed to doing things a certain way will be resistant to change, or anxious about the effect of new technologies on their own role. Be sure that the purpose of the new technology is communicated to your teams, and how it will benefit the business or make things easier for affected employees. If employees can understand the reasoning behind using the new technology, then they are more likely to feel supportive of it rather than frustrated by the change—any resistance to the change can really harm your production rate, and so showing the benefit that it has both to the employees and the company as a whole can prove very valuable to you.

You should also considering rolling it out first to key influencers to provide positive feedback as soon as possible. Be sure that ongoing training or further information is provide—especially whenever there are any updates in the technology that will affect any processes that your employees go through to get the work done. If the new technology will affect your customers in any way, make sure to help them through the transition. You can easily do this by providing YouTube-style instruction videos on your site for them to look at and learn from.

Selecting technologies with the greatest contribution to value is essential, but realizing returns will be slow if your staff and infrastructure have difficulty adjusting. This will be easier if management emphasizes the practical aspects and supports and encourages users in adopting the new technology. Once this becomes standard policy and practice, adapting to any technical change should become easier.